Catharsis in Memory
by healyourheart
Summary: He ended up in the Belmont library. Sure, it was a different kind of fright, to sleep amongst books detailing different ways for you to be ended. But at least those books held details that weren't memories to Alucard. And there was some catharsis to imagining a death that wasn't at his father's hands.


Trigger warnings for mild mentions of suicide and mental illness, specifically abuse and trauma relating to Dracula's death and the aftermath.

I felt like Alucard deserved a better ending than the one we got from Netflix, but instead of writing my alternate ending, I wrote what would happen after the canonical ending in my opinion. Let it be said: friends do not leave friends alone in the castle where they killed their father, especially not after that friend has brought up the possibility of suicide. :)

* * *

The hardest part was the waking up.

It was the waking up and having to reprocess everything all over again. To accept the responsibility and reality of everything that had happened, that he had done.

Alucard had been ready to accept his father's rage, so the nightmares that acted like second by second reels of the events of that night weren't hard to get through. Falling through the floors of his childhood home by the force of his father's hand, Alucard could deal with that. Having his head slammed into the stone floors of the castle with a force so hard that the floor began to crack and chip away, Alucard could deal with that.

In fact, Alucard could deal with just about everything that his father had done to him, as well as everything that his father hadn't gotten to do to him that his brain thought up while he was asleep.

But the waking up from the nightmares was the hard part, the impossible part. Waking up, alone in his room, alone in a castle that held all of the memories of that night, and realizing that everything his father had done to him was real and that Alucard had survived it all only to end his father's life in a way that his father had been so close to doing to him… That was the hard part. Waking up only to see how everything had changed.

There was always this split second between the nightmare ending and consciousness fully hitting Alucard, this split second where Alucard was still half asleep, only half conscious. Alucard wished he could live there forever. That split second felt like bliss. It was after the pain of the dream had stopped and before the pain of reality had set in. In that moment, Alucard could pretend that nothing bad had ever happened and that the nightmare was just that: a nightmare, a fiction made up by his mind in a twisted attempt to scare him, rather than a reel of memories replayed. There, in that moment, Alucard didn't have to think about his father or his mother or even himself and everything he had done and that he was.

The waking up was the hardest part because of that split second of bliss. After it ended and Alucard fully awoke, reality always felt like a crushing stone on his chest that he had to fight against to breathe. And he didn't have any way to lift it.

One can brush away a dream. One can not brush away reality.

Alucard lasted in the castle for all of three nights. The nightmares were bad, but waking up was made all the more worse because of the castle. It was entering from one nightmare into another. The castle was pitch black at night and the ghosts of those who had died in it seemed to roam around.

Daylight was just as bad for the castle's demeanor, if not worse. Alucard would still wake from nightmares, but this time he couldn't tell where the nightmare ended and the memories began.

Not even a week and Alucard couldn't take it. If he had stayed in that castle for another night, he would have made a noose out of his bedsheets, just to make it all stop.

He ended up in the Belmont library. Sure, it was a different kind of fright, to sleep amongst books detailing different ways for you to be ended. But at least those books held details that weren't memories to Alucard. And there was some catharsis to imagining a death that wasn't at his father's hands.

So he dragged his bedsheets and blankets down the broken staircases into the old library. When Trevor and Sypha left, they assumed he would pick up the pieces and rebuild both the library and the castle. If only they could see him now, huddled in a corner, in a fortress made of books, catching only a few hours of sleep every few days.

Alucard had a lot of time to think, in between sleeping and browsing the shelves of the belmont collection.

He thought about his mother, whether or not she would have liked him and the choices he made.

Killing his father was the right thing to do and Alucard never doubted that, not after Trevor had made sure Alucard knew what he had stopped by killing Dracula. Dracula would never have stopped his crusade against the human race and it would have likely spread out of Wallachia into the rest of Europe and beyond that before Dracula was satisfied. Alucard's revenge on his father was inevitable in that respect.

But aside from its inevitability, what would she have thought about it, about Alucard being the one to push that stake through his father's heart. Would she have thought that Trevor or Sypha should have been the ones to end it and have the final blow? Or would she have agreed that it was Alucard's calling? That Alucard had to be the one to do it and that it was a family matter in the end?

Would she have even thought that Trevor or Sypha would have been able to do it? And what would she have thought about them besides their fighting abilities? The belmont's entire life work was geared towards killing her love and she believed in science, not magic. But somehow, Alucard thought she would have liked them.

Alucard wondered why his mother had never been turned. Especially since she had a child with Dracula and it was vampire custom to turn a mortal before they could conceive children with a vampire. Alucard figured that it was because of a love for his mother's mortality that kept his father from turning her. Or maybe it was solely Lisa's wish to remain mortal. Either way, the result was Alucard, a mutant that neither species wanted to accept.

It hadn't mattered before she died. It wasn't obvious in any way that Alucard wasn't solely a vampire. He had all of the abilities of his father's son. Sunlight was the only obvious factor that kept Alucard remembering his status in the world. But no one had bothered to piece that together before she had died. It was only afterwards, after Dracula's decree against humanity, that Alucard's status became a problem.

He was human.

That was what he told himself at the worst moments, hidden in a corner of that library, too scared of himself to see a future where he could be happy. When the thoughts about what future he could even have thought he could have became too loud, that was the only thing he could find solace in.

He _was _human. Some part of him was human. He had proven that by never thinking for one second that his father was right. He had always fought against him. That had to count for something. With all of the knowledge he held, he couldn't find a concrete definition of human, but that had to be part of it. To fight for more than just his survival. That had to make him human.

Alucard refused to make a conscious effort in thinking about his father, which was why he thought about his mother so much of the time.

Sypha had told him that he was allowed to mourn Dracula and the man that he had been. But Alucard did not believe that that was the truth.

His father had been a monster, through and through. There shouldn't have been anything to mourn. But of course there was: his father had been a father to him once. Before his mother died, when it was him and Dracula and Lisa, together. As a family. His bedroom was proof enough: old primers from school, framed and hung up on the wall… Memories of when his father and his mother's only goals were to teach him and to better the world.

Alucard wondered if he inherited that part of Dracula, the part that had allowed him to commit the genocide that he did. Alucard wondered what it was that had made Dracula able to do the things he did, if it was the species that Dracula was apart of inherently having a twisted sense of bloodlust or if it was the circumstances that life had brought his father. Was it nature or nurture that had caused his father to do the things he did? What did that mean for Alucard? He had the same nature as his father and the nurture that had pushed him over the edge was an event that had pushed Alucard over his own edge.

Alucard would have never stood against his father when his mother was still alive. Would his father's death be another edge that Alucard would fall over and do something dire?


End file.
